Editorial: Integrating AI in social engineering: impacts and ethics across business, medicine, and industry

Artificial intelligence (AI) progressed from computational tools for learning, prediction, and decision-making into an infrastructure that mediates how human behavior is observed, interpreted, and influenced. This evolution fundamentally redefines social engineering (SE), seen as the strategic exploitation of human behavior and cognitive vulnerabilities to influence decisions or induce actions. In the contemporary technological landscape, the challenge of SE extends beyond whether a person can be deceived by an isolated malicious message, it concerns how AI systems shape what is visible, how peopleand situations are represented, and how decisions are taken. The 10 contributions to this Research Topic (RT) examine this dynamic across diverse organizational, cultural, and institutional settings from Europe, Asia, Africa, and Latin America, demonstrating that AI capabilities expand organizational efficiency and analytical precision across business,healthcare, and industrial sectors, by generating novel vectors of behavioral vulnerability and strategic influence.